Tag Archives: Hill Farmstead

My latest featured article for RateBeer’s The HopPress… posted on Saturday, February 5th.

Like many of you, I really look forward to the Ratebeer Best lists being released every year. It gives me a chance to look at the brewing industry as a whole and see who was hot and who was not in the previous year. I have taken some time to look through the various lists released last week and have a few comments and observations about their content this year.

First of all I’d like to call to your attention the appearance of one of Vermont’s own brewers, the Hill Farmstead Brewery, on these these lists. Hill Farmstead is listed twice on Ratebeer’s Best; as the top new brewery in the world and also for his truly wonderful Edward Pale Ale. If you have followed some of my previous articles here, you know that Shaun Hill’s small brewery, located in the tiny town of Greensboro in north-central Vermont is one of several shining stars among the 21 breweries that can be currently found in this small state. The appearance of Hill Farmstead on these lists is but the latest in an already impressive accumulation of accolades and awards that this young brewer has earned over the last few years. At last year’s World Beer Cup, three of Shaun’s beers, created by Shaun when he was working for Danish brewer Nørrebro Bryghus, won medals (2 golds and a silver) at this lofty international competition. If you look through the Ratebeer ratings for Shaun’s beers you will quickly see that Vermonters are not the only ones that are in love with Shaun’s creations and I truly believe that many of his beers would stand up well against a goodly portion of the other beers on Ratebeer’s Best. For many of you, however, Hill Farmstead beers might be some of the best beers that you will have never tried, as Shaun currently only runs about a 7-barrel operation and, although I know that some of his beers have appeared in Philly and NYC, most of Shaun’s beers do not make it very far out of Vermont… and that is fine with me. Come to Vermont and find out why Hill Farmstead rightly deserves their spot among the other brewers on Ratebeer’s Best.

My latest featured article for RateBeer’s The HopPress… posted on Saturday, December 4th.

This is the second in a series of articles which highlight the wonderful variety of breweries available to us Vermonters. As I have told you before, with 21 in-state breweries and less than 650,000 people in the entire state, Vermont has the very best ratio of breweries to people in the country. In my first article in this series – Made in Vermont: Burlington Region – I included a brief review of seven of the breweries in Vermont’s northwest corner. In today’s article I will focus on the more northern central region of the state and another six breweries which can be found within this region.

My latest featured article for RateBeer’s The HopPress… posted on Saturday, September 4th.

I am taking a step away from the type of article that you normally read from me to participate in something that has become somewhat of a beer writer’s tradition; The Session. The Session is a group writing project that was conceived by Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer. This is an opportunity for beer writers/bloggers all over the world to “gather” and write about a single beer-related topic on the first Friday of every month. Each month the Session is hosted by an esteemed beer writer/blogger on their own site. Writers post their articles to their own blog and leave a link to their article in a comment on the host writer’s beer blog. The host writer then posts a summary article at the end of the Session highlighting some of the other articles that were written. As you can see by the session number this project has been going on for a while.

My latest featured article for RateBeer’s The Hop Press… posted on Saturday, May 8th.

Even for Vermonters, Greensboro, VT is just a bit off of the beaten path. There are no Interstate highways, freeways or even what most people would consider major highways nearby. Get off of the larger paved roads that do exist and your GPS is quickly made useless by the network of unpaved roads that crisscross the farmland which dominates the countryside in this region.